Here you have a round-up of recent news on how cog­ni­tive and affec­tive neu­ro­science find­ings are start­ing to inform edu­ca­tion and health across the lifespan:

Pedi­a­tri­cians issue a call to aid chil­dren fac­ing ‘toxic stress’ (LA Times)

Teach­ers as Brain-Changers: Neu­ro­science and Learn­ing (EdWeek) Read the rest of this entry »

We just noticed that the Alliance for Aging Research offers an excel­lent list of ref­er­ences on Brain Health Research, orga­nized in these 10 sec­tions below. Enjoy!

#1 Nour­ish Your Nog­gin: Eat a Brain Healthy Diet Read the rest of this entry »

As part of the research behind the book The Sharp­Brains Guide for Brain Fit­ness we inter­viewed dozens of lead­ing cog­ni­tive health and fit­ness sci­en­tists and experts world­wide to learn about their research and thoughts, and have a num­ber of take-aways to report.

What can we clearly say today that we couldn’t have said only 10 years ago? That what neu­ro­science pio­neer San­ti­ago Ramon y Cajal claimed in the XX cen­tury, “Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculp­tor his own brain”, may well become real­ity in the XXI.

And trans­form Edu­ca­tion, Health, Train­ing, and Gam­ing in the process, since Read the rest of this entry »

We’re host­ing here at Sharp­Brains the Octo­ber 5th edi­tion of Grand Rounds blog car­ni­val, the weekly col­lec­tion of best health/ med­ical blog posts. You can sub­mit posts until end of Sun­day: alvaro at sharp­brains dot com, indi­cat­ing Grand Rounds in the sub­ject line. And don’t for­get to come back on Tuesday!

If you hap­pen to be in Barcelona, Spain, on Sep­tem­ber 14th, make sure to attend Alvaro Fer­nan­dez talk there titled “How and Why Dig­i­tal Tech­nol­ogy Will Trans­form Edu­ca­tion, Train­ing and Brain Health”.

• Date: 14/09/2010
• Time: 19:00
• Place: ESADEFORUM. Av. Pedralbes 60–62.

Descrip­tion: You have a brain. Make it reflect on this provoca­tive vision of how the con­ver­gence of demo­graphic and polit­i­cal trends with the dis­cov­er­ies of neu­ro­science and dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy can give rise to a global mar­ket capa­ble of trans­form­ing the way in which we develop and main­tain our brains, in order to attain the high­est pos­si­ble level of brain health and per­for­mance through­out our lives. The neu­ro­sci­en­tist Ramón y Cajal once said: “Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculp­tor of his own brain”. This has become a pre­vail­ing desire, pro­moted by baby boomers who, as they approach their 60th birth­day, embark on a search for life­long “brain fitness”.

Learn more and Reg­is­ter Here.

Mar­ian Dia­mond, UC-Berkeley: “Peo­ple fre­quently do the same level of cross­word puz­zles to stim­u­late their brains year after year. They do not chal­lenge their brains with more dif­fi­cult lev­els of puz­zles. In our research, we showed that if we chal­lenged the rats to reach their food cups by hav­ing to climb over many obstruc­tions, their brains increased more than those of rats who could walk unhin­dered to their food cups. Chal­lenge increased brain size.”

Tom War­den, All­state: “… we see the oppor­tu­nity that cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­vides as just the next evo­lu­tion of things that we can advo­cate and get behind that ulti­mately make for a bet­ter dri­ving expe­ri­ence, a safer dri­ving expe­ri­ence for peo­ple. Not only for our insureds, but to help the roads be safer for everyone…what we did is to attempt to repli­cate the results that were observed in the lab­o­ra­tory envi­ron­ment where older dri­vers who have com­pleted a good amount of train­ing, 10 hours or more of train­ing, had shown that the risk of crash could be reduced by up to about 50%.”

David White­house, OptumHealth Behav­ioral Solu­tions: “Man­aged care has not always been on the fore­front of inno­va­tion and it has been, for us, a chal­lenge and an excite­ment to think about how best to incor­po­rate the lat­est find­ings in neu­ro­science. If I was to give you the major areas that we think are impor­tant, one is the impor­tance of neu­ro­science capa­bilit­ties to improve triage, the sec­ond is the impor­tance that this has on increas­ing access to much bet­ter func­tional assess­ments and its rela­tion­ship to safety. The third is in the area of clin­i­cal deci­sion sup­port and the fourth is in brain health. First and fore­most, why is it that in every other organ we have objec­tive data of the organ itself doing its work under var­i­ous loads to help us when we need to make deci­sions about its health and dis­ease state and how best to sup­port it and intervene.”

William Reich­man, Bay­crest: “…we must do for brain health in the 21st cen­tury what we largely accom­plished in car­dio­vas­cu­lar health in the past century…that includes an increased focus not only on ter­tiary pre­ven­tion, but on pri­mary and sec­ondary prevention…approximately a year and a half ago the Ontario gov­ern­ment made a deci­sion to invest $10 mil­lion in Canada’s first cen­tre for brain fit­ness to be housed at Bay­crest at the Rot­man Research Institute.…Here in Canada I think that we’ve been able to make a com­pelling case main­tain­ing good brain fit­ness needs to be a national pri­or­ity for this coun­try and we have been engaged in dis­cus­sions with the gov­ern­ment, both fed­er­ally and provin­cially, that brain health pro­grams really need to begin in childhood.”

P Murali Doraiswamy, Duke Uni­ver­sity: “… you don’t want to walk into a gro­cery store or into a gas sta­tion and see a brain game claim­ing that they’re a neu­ro­plas­tic­ity brain game or a bot­tle of water that’s claim­ing it’s a cog­ni­tive reserve enhancer because then I think you’re going to destroy the whole field key…So I think it’s essen­tial for acad­e­mia, for indus­try, for think tanks, for even the fed­eral gov­ern­ment agen­cies such as per­haps Eng­land, US, Canada, to come together and form a set of guide­lines that can really guide the proper devel­op­ment of a lot of these prod­ucts and by prod­ucts I’m talk­ing about two types of prod­ucts. One is cog­ni­tive screen­ing instru­ments and the sec­ond is inter­ven­tion prod­ucts to either improve sort of nor­mal func­tion­ing or to increase resilience to stress or three, to pre­vent disease.”

(answer­ing to audi­ence ques­tion, “when do you believe that cog­ni­tive screen­ing may become a pretty rou­tine part of stan­dard med­ical care”) “I think it’s long overdue…the brain is the most impor­tant organ.”

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In Jan­u­ary of 2010 Sharp­Brains pro­duced the inau­gural vir­tual, global Sharp­Brains Sum­mit on Tech­nol­ogy for Cog­ni­tive Health and Per­for­mance (Jan­u­ary 18-20th, 2010). The Sum­mit fea­tured a dream team of over 40 speak­ers who are lead­ers in indus­try and research to dis­cuss emerg­ing research, tools and best prac­tices for cog­ni­tive health and per­for­mance, and gath­ered over 250 par­tic­i­pants in 16 countries.

Are you inter­ested in what over 40 lead­ing sci­en­tists, clin­i­cians, exec­u­tives and tech­nol­o­gists have to say about the lat­est Tech­nol­ogy for Cog­ni­tive Health and Per­for­mance? Want to hear how they responded to more than 200 audi­ence ques­tions? You can Learn more Here (full tran­scripts are now avail­able). Sharp­Brains read­ers can get a 15% dis­count Read the rest of this entry »

The Sharp­Brains Sum­mit is ongo­ing, with 242 par­tic­i­pants in 15 coun­tries! thanks to the IT brains at the Insti­tute for The Future and col­lab­o­ra­tors such as Anett Gyu­rak, Pas­cale Mich­e­lon and Camille Fin­ley, event is going great.

If you Twit­ter, you can fol­low my updates here. The Sum­mit hashtag/ feed is #sharp2010. Par­tic­i­pants who were actively tweet­ing the first day:

@IFTFHealth @rodfalcon @positscience @billiamjames @drg @FitLifeClubs

@performbetter @YoungDrivers @AOborne

(Reg­is­tra­tion is closed now for new par­tic­i­pants, please sub­scribe to our eNewslet­ter if you want to learn about future events)

The July/ August 2009 issue of The Jour­nal on Active Aging includes my arti­cle Why We Need to Retool “Use It Or Lose It“

An excerpt:

“By now you have prob­a­bly heard about brain plas­tic­ity, the life­long capac­ity of the brain to change and rewire itself in response to the stim­u­la­tion of learn­ing and expe­ri­ence. The lat­est sci­en­tific research shows that spe­cific lifestyles and actions can improve the health and level of func­tion­ing of our brains, no mat­ter our age.

Of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance to main­tain­ing cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing through life are the hip­pocam­pus (deep inside the brain, part of what is called the lim­bic sys­tem), which plays a role in learn­ing and mem­ory; and the frontal lobes (behind your fore­head), which are key to main­tain­ing decision-making and auton­omy. Is there a way to phys­i­cally pro­tect these parts of the aging brain? Yes. But the right answer is far from “do one more cross­word puz­zle” or “do more X” (what­ever X is). The key is to add sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties to ensure a flow of nov­elty, vari­ety and chal­lenge, com­bin­ing phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise while not ignor­ing fac­tors such as stress man­age­ment and bal­anced nutrition.

We need, in other words, to retool our under­stand­ing and prac­tice of “Use it or lose it.” We must focus on the impor­tance of get­ting out of our phys­i­cal and men­tal rou­tines and activ­i­ties to get the ben­e­fits of real exercise—physical and mental.”

Con­tinue read­ing Why We Need to Retool “Use It Or Lose It”

A cou­ple of very well curated col­lec­tions of recent blog posts:

Encephalon #64: hosted by Neu­r­o­critic, cov­er­ing neu­ro­science and psy­chol­ogy. Please make sure to visit when you have some time to spare…because you will quickly become addicted to the qual­ity con­tent and superb presentation.

It’s Grand Rounds, What Do You Think? GOSH!: hosted by Kim at Emergi­Blog, with an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary, “Napoleon Dyna­mite”, frame. Doesn’t seem to make sense? well, pay a visit.

Here you have Sharp­Brains’ 30 most pop­u­lar arti­cles, ranked by the num­ber of peo­ple who have read each arti­cle in 2008.

Please note that, since the first arti­cle already includes most of our most pop­u­lar brain teasers, we have excluded teasers from the rest of the rank­ing. (If those 50 are not enough for you, you can also try these brain teasers).

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Read the rest of this entry »